A Spanish Convict, her clergyman biographer, and the amanuensis of her bastard son

Abstract

In 1829 Adelaide de la Thoreza, a twenty-three-year-old woman born in Madrid, was tried at London's Old Bailey and sentenced to seven years' transportation to Australia. Half a century later a Presbyterian clergyman in the New South Wales town of Richmond wrote a biography of this Spanish convict, who had recently died. In this book chapter we interrogate his romantic account of how the daughter of Spanish aristocrats became first a convict and then a pioneer mother, whose oldest son Alf was born in the Parramatta Female Factory and given the surname "Smith" to cover his illegitimacy. Alf's reminiscences of life as a drover were published in 1909.